11 June 1992
Would this have got to number one if the two lads had worn their jeans the right way around and were old enough to shave? You’d have to suspect not. By this stage in 1992, rap singles only got to number one in Ireland and the UK as some sort of novelty act or gimmick, and by Christ was this sold to us as a gimmick: two kids with their trousers on back-to-front, rapping about being the mack daddy and the daddy mack. Aw, bless!
The slightly galling thing about the novelty angle is that this is actually a good record which could well have stood on its own merits. That micro-sample of ‘I Want You Back’ may lean into the cute-little-nippers image again, but it’s a well-chosen burst of energy and sass. Another good sample in there is the distinctive floorboard-bouncing beat of DJ Muggs from Cypress Hill, so credit this track for being an early adopter of what would be the sound of 1993. All those samples add up, by the way: ‘Jump’ has 26 (twenty-six) writers as a result, so by the end there probably wasn’t much pie to go round.
The bigger boy putting these two kids up to it was Jermaine Dupri, only turning 20 in 1992, at the start of a career where he would produce or collaborate with Mariah Carey, Usher and many other US hip-hop and R ‘n’ B cash cows. My cynicism here is born of irritation at how rap and hip-hop, which in 1992 was bringing us Dr Dre’s astonishingly cool G-funk sound on The Chronic, is again packaged for mainstream consumption as unthreatening and almost literally infantilised, somewhere between Vanilla Ice and the theme from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The jeans weren’t the only thing arseways here.
